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Iger on Steve Jobs: ‘He Pushed You’

By Brooks Barnes October 6, 2011 3:11 pmOctober 6, 2011 3:11 pm

In a telephone interview Thursday, Robert A. Iger, chief executive of Disney, spoke of his relationship with Steve Jobs, who founded Pixar around a computer unit he purchased from George Lucas. When Disney bought Pixar in 2006 for $7.4 billion, Mr. Jobs received a 7.4 percent stake in Disney and a seat on the board. Here are excerpts from the interview:

“Steve loved Hawaii, and I walked beaches with him there. We went on several long walks. On one of them I was musing about Disney building a hotel there and where might be the right place to do it. He said: ‘Why don’t you buy Lanai? You should just buy the whole island. Think big. Don’t just build a resort.’ I said I haven’t noticed a for sale sign lately. Not all of Steve’s ideas were good or practical. The point was that he pushed you.”

“He never wanted to be treated like our largest shareholder. When I strayed from that, he would shoot me down fast. He admonished me a couple times for doing it. He would tell me to treat him as a friend and adviser, nothing more. His advice was usually to be independent minded, to not take safe paths or follow ordinary routes, to write your own playbook. I loved that advice. These jobs can sometimes be lonely, and it’s nice to have somebody to bounce ideas off of or be reminded of certain things. He would remind me constantly about quality – the number of consumer products we created, the number of movies we made. Try to make the best things and only those.”

“Our interaction varied. Sometimes we spoke twice a week, sometimes it was once a month. He would call me on Saturday afternoons and we’d chat for an hour. We had great talks about the future of digital media and each one was about how people would ultimately consume things — it was never about the distribution mechanism. It was, ‘What will people want?’ ”

“When the Disney board voted to make me the next C.E.O. in 2005 but before it was made public, I called my daughters and my parents and Steve Jobs. I didn’t know him very well at the time. But there was something that struck me that it would be important to tell him before the world knew.”

“It didn’t immediately open up a discussion about Pixar, but he let me in on the secret of the video iPod — which was thrilling because I was very interested in delivering video the way he was already delivering music. A few months later we were making the announcement with him to make some of our shows available on it. That showed him that Disney had the guts to try something and that the two of us had a similar vision for the future.”